Don't get me wrong. There are some areas of reporting in the ABC where they have been doing an OK job ( eg some areas of medicine and health science ) but the respect for sound full science reporting is now rare and even the good studies of health reporting are not helping in the maelstrom of simplified nonsense that the club have agreed to over the last 40 years in particular .
Thanks in part to neglected reporting by the ABC , the profession of ecological economists ( the new progressive edge of resilience science EE's ) who work with the real resource issues, is now defunct .
In labelling the green side of politics the good side, the ABC have become too political and lost their independence there.
Compare that with medical profession which is still in a strong position to defend its territory. Many competent health care professionals struggled through the political takeover of COVID risk by politics and must regret, like we do, that proper discussion of interference medicine and health care ( edgy science stuff that needs testing ) is increasingly difficult, very draining ( defence of our profession is not what most of us want to do ) and sometimes just impossible - we go silent and go back to work .Hijacking of science is not new and was the sort of concrete danger and threat that Whitehead and Ellul anticipated over 100 years ago; few know
There are now many silent and silence competency associations who the ABC don't even know about. Let's call them the "zipped "club . Zipped and tight lipped ZATLOP's
The problem Australians now have is best illustrated by the fact they cannot trust the ABC to report on ecological economy and environmental risk ; and haven't been for decades, This arrogant incompetence , has of course made most of Australia's most productive citizens on the land go mad. The ABC is no longer welcome in the country for its arrogant incompetence on matters of conservation science and practice in particular. (apparent exceptions like Landline , Back roads and Gardening Australia should be discussed later in their proper contexts)
The whole EE profession has become too political and a proper discussion too long winded to properly engage the wider audience. Maybe the baby has been thrown out with the dishwater?
It is the ABC and our inadequate education and mentoring system that are largely responsible for this massive distraction from a much-needed goal. Our children's failure to enjoy the idea of a career working with people who work with nature is one of the consequences of this. Australia could and should be a lead trainer of people in resilience and ecological economic EE science; instead of bench testers we have screen testers. Instead of training foreign students to help them manage their own land (eg the old Columbo plan) we offer our land to foreigners. Like Romanians, the slow East , the failed USSR , the authoritarian states, and all those who are too slow to move with history and new industry ( including EE ) we will reap the poverty rewards of too much focus on land alone.
A lesser known reality is that by taking the lead in science classes where they are not qualified to do so , the ABC club have dumbed down the issues and left our children with more fear and confusion than anyone of us who knows their territory in sound scientific planning would have ever expected. . This is a huge area of importance for the future, but one that has little proper focus on it.
The ABC , when not doing kindergarten science offer us razzamatazz and quick fiz .Someone like Todd Sampson and ABC producers, just don't get it.
The fact that so many western children know so little about how the world works is deeply disturbing and I encourage you the reader to not give up in pursuing the full set of answers so that our children can enjoy designing and working with nature rather than simply fearing the consequences of man's inevitable failures to properly engage with it . Don't ever dismiss the misanthropes either
So how could this be ? There is nothing the ABC like to talk more about than applied science .
The clue is the leadership within the organization and the culture of nature and science worship ( some would say scientism) that has largely replaced the respect for true reporting of edgy science arguments. Australia needs a very robust independent science association that builds from the regions up.
A driver for so much fearmongering in the ABC seems to be simply the clubs denial that they really understand its role in developing and promoting advances in scientific understanding. They know Shoemaker ( communication of innovations ) but little else . Like many of the commercial media they understand enough science to be dangerous ; being more techno tragics than patient testers as Ellul put it ; and are selling solutions that have not been tested . The ABC need to run a lot more programs on the scrapheap challenges of history .
This distracted agency is nothing new .Regional people are seen by the city as backward. Children think they know more than their parents and teachers.
Who should the public trust ?
Inexperienced people often think that wisdom origins itself at University , I am a member of an international science agency and the biggest problem with the many academics in that organisation is that they cannot easily commit to real world decsion making : They say nothing or nothing that hasn't been through the rocky horror show of citations
.If the ABC knew what they were doing they would realize that experienced professionals face risks everyday and learn and develop confidence by testing theory on the ground; the things that most academics are not really responsible for
Most Academics are so specialized that they can say nothing edgy because they know so much about such a small area, Careless one who get their faces on the media should not be easily trusted because wise trustable ones are aware of the limitations of their brief . Wise ones can be Zatlops too!
The people should trust the locals, who know the country
Regional people are seen by the city as backward. This old perception still dogs better understanding of modern reality for many reasons.
It's now the dependant and distant wage city based earners who are distant, Their connection with real world risk is through unreliable mediums. They see bt do not understand and are very vulnerable to the media link person
The bloke who turned the world upside down was dismissed by many because he came from the country - Nazareth .
Australians need to commit to understanding where confidence , knowledge , ecological economics and competence is really built.
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